Greene County experiences boom in population growth

GREENEVILLE, Tenn. (WJHL) — More people are moving to Greeneville and calling it home.

It’s some of the most population growth the town has seen in years.

“What’s interesting is that from 2000 to 2021, we saw a 13% increase in population,” said Jeff Taylor, CEO and president of the Greene County Partnership. “We’re starting to see a new movement of young families moving back to more rural communities.”

With the increase of people moving to the area, more housing developments have to be built to accommodate the growth.

“We’ve got 12 to 15 condos that are being built or are in the process of being built,” Greeneville Mayor Cal Doty said. “I think all of these activities that the town have done are stimulating growth in our downtown area.”

Doty told News Channel 11 that the increase in people has required the town to make sure schools and roadways can keep up. That is why the town started the redevelopment project of Main Street and Depot Street.

“It’s always your road system first,” Taylor said. “And then I would also say second, secondarily would be education.”

Mayor Doty said they are currently looking at building a middle school because other schools in the area are close to capacity.

“We’ve seen probably a 5% to 7% increase,” Taylor said. “We’re seeing it in student enrollments, we’re seeing it in traffic counts. We’re doing road studies to accommodate this rapid increase.”

But Taylor added that it’s not just companies coming in and building new homes, its also private homeowners buying up land.

“We’re seeing a lot of the big family farms being subdivided, an acre here, five acres there,” Taylor said. “That’s where we’ve seen the growth and we’ve seen easily two, three 400 homes being built.”

The question is what is drawing more people to the area? Doty said it’s the political atmosphere.

“We still believe in individual rights and freedoms and there’s people that are looking for that,” Doty said. “We’ve also got a low tax rate, even though we did raise taxes recently, we’re still much, much lower than the national average.”